Posts Tagged ‘Met Office’

Writing in The Guardian, Robin McKie reports (August 6th, 2016) that climatologists are warning that the +1.5C global warming target informally adopted by the “breakthrough” Paris Agreement signed at COP21 last year is already very close to being broken. McKie cites data from “Ed Hawkins of Reading University show[ing] that average global temperatures were already more than 1C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38C in February and March.” The Potsdam climatologist Joachim Schellnhuber is then quoted, delineating a radical vision for averting the +1.5C goal, one that is entirely contradictory to the exigencies of the capitalist mode of production:

“It means that by 2025 we will have to have closed down all coal-fired power stations across the planet. And by 2030 you will have to get rid of the combustion engine entirely. That decarbonisation will not guarantee a rise of no more than 1.5C but it will give us a chance. But even that is a tremendous task.”

McKie closes by raising the possibility that the world may well overshoot the 1.5C target but then retroactively calm planetary overheating using negative-emissions technologies. How this would happen is not made very clear.

In parallel, on 2 August, Oliver Milman writes about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) newly released “State of the Climate Report 2015,” which details the “’toppling of several symbolic mileposts’ in heat, sea level rise and extreme weather in 2015.” These include the overall record heat experienced in 2015, both atmospherically and in the oceans–with the eastern Pacific Ocean being subjected to record heat of +2C, and the Arctic experiencing a similar record-shattering increase of +8C–as well as record sea level rise and the lowest-ever recorded Arctic sea-ice minimum. These alarming planetary symptoms correspond in turn to the record CO2 atmospheric concentration of 400ppm. Milman notes as well the Met Office scientist Kate Willett’s observation that “there was a 75% annual increase in the amount of land that experienced severe drought last year.”

Please see below for a reproduction of the telling NOAA charts published in the Guardian article.